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73416ba
(Get the code!)
Reproduced in Ubuntu 9.10 beta; reopening.
From the duplicate bug 387444, apparently this is deliberate behavior on the part of the ubufox developers: YouTube uses the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit instead of standard <embed> code, and therefore ubufox does not put up the plug-in finder bar.
The Canonical Design team has just discussed this. Even if the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit is "stupid" as described in bug 387444, we do not think that merely calling it stupid and doing nothing else is a reasonable or sustainable approach in the face of YouTube using it. And the experience of installing Flash via adobe.com is much less obvious or pleasant (.yum? .tar.gz? .rpm? .deb? .wtf?), and presumably less updatable too, than the experience of installing it from the Ubuntu (or Canonical partner) repository via the plug-in finder.
There are several ways this might be fixed.
One way would be to persuade YouTube to switch to standard <embed> code, like Google Video uses, possibly using the more complex Flash detection only for browsers where standard <embed> does not produce a reasonable installation invitation; and to persuade Adobe to change the Flash Player Detection Kit code accordingly. Have any Ubuntu developers done anything about this so far? If so, what?
A second way would be to special-case youtube.com video pages so that if Flash is not installed, the plug-in finder bar appears regardless of what is actually on the page. Yes, this would be a hack (for example, it would produce false positives if YouTube adopted HTML5 <video>), but no more of a hack than Safari's special-casing of youtube.com pages on an iPhone.
A third way would be for ubufox to patch the Firefox code that is triggered by the Adobe Flash Player Detection Kit, to pretend that the Flash plug-in is installed regardless of whether it actually is. Again, this would be a hack, but it would continue in a grand tradition of Web browsers pretending they do or don't support particular things for Web site compatibility.